Lenovo To Design Their Own Chips For Smartphone And Tablets

Lenovo has decided that they will step into the chip design business for smartphones and tablets. The Chinese based PC Maker seems to be making plans to expand their smartphone business and are also rumoured to be in talks with NEC over mobile phone unit acquisition.

The company will be expanding their existing team of 10 people to design integrated circuits by about 100 engineers by the middle of 2014. 40 engineers will be hired in Shenzhen and 60 will be employed in Beijing, China (according to an anonymous source).

However its not clear if Lenovo’s decision to have their own in-house team to design their chip will help, Shao Yang, CMO of Huawei said that the company should be concentrating on having better negotiations with established semi-conductor manufacturers.

Lenovo has also been restructuring their senior management team in the hopes that they can become the a larger electronics company, Jerry Yang, co-founder and former CEO of Yahoo is kept as a board observer whereas Tudor Brown, one of the founders of ARM is now the non-executive director for Lenovo.

So far, Lenovo used MediaTek MT6573 processor in their A60 smartphone but in 2012, they’ve used Samsung Electronic’s Exynos 4 Quad Core processor. K900 used Intel’s dual core Atom processors for mobile devices, followed by Z2580 with a processor twice the CPU performance of Intel’s single core Medfield processor.

This maybe triggered by Samsung’s decision not to supply its newest Exynoss processors to Lenovo. Currently Samsung enjoys the #1 spot for China’s smartphone market share of 17.7%, but closely followed by Lenovo with the Chinese smartphone market share of 13.2% as on 2012, followed by Apple, Inc with 11%.

Source: EE Times